By: Jessica Sun

It was the late fifth century B.C. and a soldier digs a hole in the floor. He places a small jug, called an olpe, in the hole for safekeeping. Inside the olpe is his savings-many gold coins. But something happens to the soldier, and he never retrieves his coins again. It remained undiscovered for the last 2,400 years.
Christopher Ratté, an archaeologist at the University of Michigan, was with his research team recently at the ruins of Notion, an ancient city-state in modern-day Turkey.

While they were digging underneath the courtyard of a house, they found the jug of gold coins.
“The coins were buried in a corner of the older building,” Dr. Ratté said. “We weren’t actually looking for a pot of gold.”

Notion was the first Greek speaking community in the region during the early first millennium B.C.
“This was true in deepest antiquity, as remembered in the story of the Trojan War,” Dr. Ratté said. “And it remains true to this day, as demonstrated by the Syrian refugee crisis.” It is awesome that they found the gold coins because scientists can put it in museums to see what gold coins looked like in that time.

In 546 B.C., an area, known as Ionia, was conquered by the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Even though Croesus was killed in the battle by Cyrus the Great, his gold-based system still lived. The Persians continued to manufacture Croesids until they came up with their own bimetallic currency, made of silver coins called sigloi. They also made gold coins, called darics, named after eith